AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jun 17, 2021 11:32 pm
Those are good questions and ones Cleric can respond to much better and with more detail. My preliminary remark is that we are talking of consciousness highly integrated with
Nature
Let's stop right here. What does "Nature" mean??? As it's European language speaking, with the Latin etymology (Latin natura has root meaning of 'birth') word chosen this time, I suppose "Nature" refers here to the object of physicalism, given birth by post-Cartesian scientism. The other aspect of the nature-object of the European Subject, besides object of material extraction, is the romantic object-desire of urban way of life, from the perspective of it's highly desensitized and mechanized sensual sphere. Corresponding Greek word fysis comes from core meaning of 'growth'. Note that Germanic languages English, German etc. don't have corresponding domestic word, but use the colonizing Greco-Latin concept.
So, this meaning of "Nature" is here already potentially very misguiding projection to some kind of objectified - instead of actually experienced - idea. If by "ancestors" you mean your Germanic language speaking ancestors before their colonization by the Roman Empire etc., how could they be integrated with something you don't have a word for, cant conceptualize, but still claim to have some expert knowledge that comes from reading theoretical work of Barfield and co, not so much from direct empirical experience?
If I may, I could offer a complementary perspective from the animistic-shamanic layers of Finnish language, based on empirical evidence of "actual" - or as we would say
true - experience. Finnish 'luonto', which translates as fysis-natura in the colonized layer of language, comes from the root meaning 'to create'. The true/actual meaning is a distinct sensual quality in the general category of spirits. The sensual quality has a close relation with sexual/reproductive energy, or simply put: power of creation.
The power of creation is, or at least can be, also highly consciouss in the metacognitive and linguistic aspect of thinking and being. Incantations begin with vocal raising of Luonto, to integrate with power of creation, and in the integrating sentience also words and trusts of
Births can be sung and spoken. Tolkien's cosmogony of 'Great Song of Ainur' is a poetic insight to the core meaning of Luonto, embedded in a linear narrative of time. Of course empirically and structurally Birth-Fysis are sung and sensed and willed into multilinear true time, which is perhaps the most sensible meaning of the Greek word dynamis.
In the Western jargon, the sentient and instinctive integration with Luonto corresponds with form-idea of
dynamic holography, ie. process philosophical version of Indra's Net. Which alone is just a theoretical image, not the true instinct of
sophrosyne. Which can be read etymologically: Being with integrated guts.
(to the point where there is no sense of "I"), but definitely not metacognitive for that same reason. There is no abstract symbolic thinking involved; no taking information and reflecting on it to form systematic representational networks as we do. But then there is also no intuitive consciousness in the sense of a distinct ego-self which intuits its relationship to the whole.
So, this does not correspond at all with the empirical perspective I just presented. The "I" is very much present in the 1st person
speech act as well as in the sentient quality of dynamically integrated part-whole relation.
You don't lose your self, your uniqueness, your participation in speech acts with various degrees of metacognition by liberating from the disasssociation-defence mechanism and construct called by Greco-Latin terms "ego-subject" and "individual". You gain.